by Our Foreign Desk

AUSTRALIA plans to offload its responsibilities to refugees onto the Philippines, Immigration Minister Peter Dutton said yesterday.

Amid a refugee crisis that rivals that in the Mediterranean, Australia’s right-wing government wants its poorer neighbours to take in those fleeing war and poverty but unwelcome Down Under.

Mr Dutton confirmed that the government had been in talks with several countries, including the Philippines, about possibly resettling its refugees in those nations.

Australia has for years refused to accept those seeking a safe haven in the country, instead shipping them off to squalid detention camps on the Pacific island nation of Nauru and Papua New Guinea’s Manus Island.

“We have been very clear about the fact that people on Nauru and people on Manus who have sought to come to our country illegally by boat won’t be settling in Australia,” Mr Dutton told reporters in the capital Canberra.

The minister hopes to expand a failed programme which promises camp inmates cash, free health insurance and accommodation if they move to Cambodia. Just four people have taken up the offer.

“If we can strike other arrangements with other countries, we will do that,” he said.

- A fire destroyed a dormitory at a maximum-security prison in the central Philippines, killing 10 inmates, officials said yesterday.

Bureau of Corrections spokesman Roberto Olaguer said the fire at Leyte regional prison may have been caused by faulty wiring in the building, which was built after an earlier fire in 2013.